Report shows many students are not prepared for college

Forty percent of Oklahoma’s public high school graduates are not prepared for college-level work in at least one subject area when they arrive on campus, a new report shows.

Of the 17,557 students who graduated in 2016 and entered an Oklahoma public college or university that fall, 7,119 enrolled in at least one remedial course.

The number increased 1.5 percent from the previous year, according to the report to the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education.

“It’s a little disappointing. Of course, we want the remediation rate to go down,” said Tony Hutchison, the regents’ vice chancellor for strategic planning, analysis and workforce and economic development.

Students who score less than 19 in a subject on the ACT often have to take a noncredit, remedial course in college before they can take the credit-bearing course in that subject. That extra step costs them time and money.

The new report shows more than one-third (34.7 percent) of the 2016 college freshmen needed remediation in math, the subject identified as the biggest barrier to college completion for students.

“Our long-term problem in math is we don’t have as many certified math teachers,” Hutchison said.

At high schools where emergency certified teachers are filling in for teachers with a mathematics education degree, “students may not be getting the foundation they need,” he said.

Do the math

Oklahoma’s Mathematics Success Initiative includes higher education officials working with K-12 schools to improve mathematics preparation before students enter college.

A new 12th-grade math course is being offered at some schools for the first time this year, Hutchison said. Students who already have the three math courses needed for high school graduation often skip taking math their senior year. It sets them up for a struggle when they get to college and haven’t been in a math class for 15 months. The new 12th-grade math course is designed to overcome that hurdle.

“That’s the first line of defense,”Hutchison said.

The second is the summer bridge program offered at colleges to help students catch up before they enter their freshman year.

And third, Oklahoma is replacing traditional noncredit remedial courses in college with co-requisite education, which puts students in the credit-bearing course and gives them additional support in a math lab.

Those students do as well as their peers who were prepared for college math courses, said Michael Oehrtman, mathematics professor at Oklahoma State University and a member of the state’s Mathematics Success Group.

These courses are doubling and tripling student

completion of college-level mathematics in half the time, Oehrtman said.

“We are rapidly continuing to increase the availability of co-requisite support for entry-level mathematics courses across the state,” he said.

Oklahoma students also are benefiting from “alternate pathways,” courses offered as an alternative to college algebra, Oehrtman said. College algebra is designed to support students who will take calculus in pursuit of a degree in STEM (science, technology, engineering and technology). Other math pathways have been developed for students who aren’t in math-intensive STEM fields.

Depending on their major, students may benefit more from one of three other courses — modeling (simulating real-life situations with mathematical equations), quantitative reasoning or statistics. These can provide more relevant content for their degree area, Oehrtman said.

“These are all rigorous mathematics courses, but focus on different needs of various fields,” he said.

“Much of our work moving forward is focused on communicating with faculty in these partner disciplines at each institution about these new options and updating degree requirements accordingly.”

Across the state

The report shows remediation rates for other subjects was 16.2 percent in English, 9.3 percent in reading and only 0.5 percent in science.

Hutchison said there are two reasons so few students take a remedial science course. The ACT science section relies on reading comprehension and general science understanding, not calculations, so students generally score well on this section. Those who don’t often learn what they need for science courses in remedial math, so they are prepared by the time they enroll in a science course.

High school graduates from Oklahoma and Tulsa counties accounted

for about 40 percent of the 2016 college freshmen statewide who sought remediation. The number was 1,473 in Oklahoma County, or 42.2 percent of public school graduates who entered a public college or university. In Tulsa County, the number was 1,400, or 42.4 percent.

The highest rate of high school graduates who enrolled in remedial courses was 65.6 percent in Greer County. Other counties with half or more of the students seeking remediation were Caddo, Cotton, Haskell, Hughes, Love, Osage, Pawnee, Seminole, Texas and Tillman.

Bryan County had the lowest rate at 25.5 percent.

Five other counties had 30 percent or fewer graduates enroll in remedial courses — Grant, Major, Pushmataha, Washington and Washita.